Fischberg says that the iterative approach embodied in Agile has enabled completion of a big software project in half the time it would have taken using conventional management. The team worked with partners in finance to determine their needs, and included review and testing phases to make sure the software was giving accurate results. The users were pleased with the results.

The benefits of Agile include improved quality, more opportunities for midcourse corrections, improved customer or business satisfaction, better alignment between business and IT and improved time to market.

The article reports that other big firms are also adopting Agile including NYSE Euronext [NYX] and British Airways. British Airways sees Agile software development as a faster way to create products that would generate sales. The Department of Homeland Security is also adopting Agile as a way of lowering risk and delivering capabilities in an incremental way.

Agile: not just for managing software

Agile is attractive because it solves a fundamental management conundrum: how do you get disciplined execution along with continuous innovation? Promising efforts to improve one dimension always seem to cause losses on the other one. Disciplined execution crushes innovation, and innovation by its nature is undisciplined. The problem has seemed insoluble. Just over a decade ago, a set of major management breakthroughs occurred. These breakthroughs enabled software development teams to systematically achieve both disciplined execution and continuous innovation, something that was impossible to accomplish with traditional management methods.

Over the last decade, these management practices, under various labels such as Agile, Scrum, Kanban and Lean, have been field-tested and proven in thousands of organizations around the world.

My own recent work under the banner of radical management distills, builds on and extends these principles, practices and values so that any organization can now achieve to apply the elusive combination of disciplined execution and continuous innovation.

Agile thinking is one of the keys to the success of firms like Apple [AAPL], Amazon [AMZN] and Salesforce [CRM] It is good to see some big old traditional firms finally seeing the light. Who knows? We may soon start to see whole sectors embrace this management revolution.

Agile isn't just about better software. It's a better way of getting anything done.